Where in the Bible is the bottomless pit?

After an interminable age, my downward course was stayed and I appeared to be completely immersed in some spongy mass. 

This spongy fog gradually stopped my downward passage, but I felt no firm ground beneath me. 

The same spongy mass was above and below and around, as solid above my head as below my feet. It was neither firm ground, nor water, nor even marsh. It was something, which has no real counterpart on earth. It was the most tangible form of darkness I had met with in all hell.

There was no sound, no sight, nothing, absolute nothingness, solitude intolerable, black despair, misery unspeakable.

Oh―that ghastly silence! Utter, absolute solitude! I felt myself an utter outcast―cast forth alike from the society of men and devils.

This was the end of all my desperate striving against fate.

How can I convey to you the awful solitude of the lowest depth of Hell?

No words can ever make you realise it. Nothing else could ever have broken my proud spirit as that did.

Absolutely abandoned, forsaken, alone! 

Neither sight, nor sound, not another soul, alone, absolutely alone with one’s own thoughts. They rose before me and gibed and jeered all the evil that I had ever done.

I did not repent―I did not even feel remorse, but I felt a wild, hopeless despair. 

Their mouths shall be stopped with dust.

These thoughts seemed to take form and shriek at me―

You are damned. Look at us. We are the things, which you have begotten. What right have you for hope? All your life has been given up to evil until not even the most abandoned will associate with you. We cannot forsake you―we would if we could.

Darkness came again―it seemed like annihilation. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The darkness seemed to flow in and stop it. 

Oh―that awful loneliness! Absolutely crushing silence.

I would have done anything to get back even to the whips of the evil spirits above, but it was not to be. 

I cannot convey to you the awfulness of that solitude.

You may think that the pains of the divisions above were worse, but it was not so.

Ages seemed to pass and those terrible words came ringing in my mind―

Damned eternally.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

I suffered in solitude for what seemed endless ages.

As by a lightning flash, a phrase came into my mind, and I grasped its full meaning―

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

He who hung on the cross knew intuitively its awfulness and the despair of those who lay here.

Forsaken of God―never until now had I understood the meaning of that sentence. It had seemed to me absurd, but now I saw that He knew the sufferings of all, even those in the bottommost pit.

Think what you please of the story of the crucifixion, but this I do know—

He knew of our sufferings and realised it, and He alone knew it while He trod earth. 

As this thought sank in, it came to me that there must be some significance in it. If He intuitively knew our sufferings, He who was All-Merciful must feel some shreds of pity for us. 

Doubtless He could not help us. 

As a tree falls, so will it lie. Still, if He still lived anywhere, and if I did, surely He would, He must feel pity for me.

A new sensation grew by degrees. Why had I been such a fool? Why had I not tried by repentance to get out of hell? What was the use? I was in hell, and I could not, for hell is eternal.

I thought and thought.

At any rate, it was pleasanter to think of Christ than of other things. Why not go on thinking of Him? I felt no genuine regret for my past life, but I began to feel that I had been a fool―I had wasted my chances. Well―I must pay the price. I would not whine now―I never did on earth and I was not going to start now, but that scene on Calvary seemed to haunt me. It came as a refreshing interlude amid my other thought pictures.

I remembered my mother―I wondered where she was. She died when I was quite young, but I remembered her and could remember how she used to teach me to pray. What was it? I could not remember. Funny, I could remember everything else, but not those prayers.

Strange! I had always heard that the damned could not pray, and I was damned.

His mighty arm is strong to save. Glory be to God on high. There is no such thing as death, but perpetual hell would be death, for it means permanent separation from God.

I did not realise it, but in a feeble sort of way, I was praying―or at least, yearning after better things. 

I had gone the full course and had reached the lowest depths. Soon I would start on the upward path.

This was the turning point. This was the first faint beginning. This was the beginning of better things.

I have no idea how long I remained in that awful solitude, but it seemed like centuries.

An inspiration came to me sent, I believe, from above in answer to my inarticulate prayers.

Turn towards God. No one else, but He can help you! Turn towards God.

It was a new idea. My whole life had consisted in turning deliberately away from him. How could I turn towards him even now? Yet what would I not do to get out of this awful place? My mind reverted often to the idea, but how could I go towards him? How could I get out of this awful spongy darkness? Besides, I was damned.

Another idea flashed into my mind. Why not pray? 

I tried the Lord’s Prayer, but could not manage it. I had forgotten how to pray. 

Like an inspiration, the words suddenly burst from my lips―O God, help me!

Once spoken, they came easier and I repeated them again and again. My praying produced a pleasant sensation of warmth, which grew and grew until it became too hot. I seemed to be on fire, and the more I prayed, the more intense the heat grew. I ceased to pray, hoping it might stay the pain. 

I became aware of a new sensation―I seemed to be growing lighter, and I realised that I was slowly rising up through the darkness.

By even feeble prayer, I had begun to burn away a little of the grossest part of my nature, which had rendered my spiritual body so heavy. As it became too light to remain stuck in that darkness, my body began to rise until I saw, jutting out from the darkness, black and slippery rock at the edge of some beetling cliffs.

If you consider this lowest depth, as a deep lake of utter darkness, with forbidding cliffs all around, you will get some idea.

As soon as I saw this black, slippery rock, I tried to climb on to it, but slipped off again and again. The burning sensation had ceased, and encouraged by the benefits of prayer, I tried again. 

O God, help me to get out of this darkness.

I had hardly done so when the lake of darkness on which I was now floating instead of in it became agitated. Great waves rose up round me and seemed as if they would engulf me. 

I was lifted up and hurled on to the rock. It was as if the dark waters cast me ashore.

Bad as I still was, I was yet too good to remain there now, and so was cast up on the shore of the second lowest division. The darkness was still intense, but when I began to investigate, my heart sank. The rock seemed to jut out like a table from a high cliff and I could find no path by which to climb it. 

Remembering how useful prayer had been before, I again assayed its benefits. 

For some time nothing happened, and I began to lose heart, but after a while, my sight seemed to become clearer, for I was able to detect a hole in the cliff a short distance to the left of the flat rock. 

I found that I could just reach it with one hand, and having tried many parts of the cliff with my foot, found a sort of step or hole broken or cut in the cliff into which I placed my foot. After several more desperate struggles, I reached the cave’s entrance and found that after running some distance inland, it opened into a kind of narrow gully. 

I climbed up this gully slowly and reached a spot some way up the cliff.

Here I found a ledge of rock, which ran along the side of the cliff for some distance and followed it. I almost gave way to despair, as this too ended, and I crouched down.

I could discover no way out and began to pray again.

The mere action of praying seemed to soothe my troubled spirit.

As I rose, I heard a roar like thunder, and a mass of rock fell forward from the face of the cliff and jammed across the narrow gully close by where the path had broken off. 

This made a steep, sloping bridge. I could not see whence I stood whether the further end of the bridge led on to another path or ledge, but I felt sure that it had fallen in answer to my prayers.

With infinite pains, I scrambled on to this rough bridge. I struggled on and reached the top of the sloping stone bridge. I found that the chasm wall on the other side was more like screes than a sheer precipice. I struggled painfully up this, often slipping back, but I persevered.

My iron will stood me in good stead in this predicament.

I crawled on to comparatively level ground, rough and bouldery though it was with a sigh of relief. 

I was back in the second division of hell. 

A new fear seized me. Should I again see those devils? Nothing happened. No one came. A new terror presented itself to my mind. Had I, after all, not left the lowest depth―was I still in that awful solitude? For a moment, despair gripped me.

Were all these painful efforts in vain? Were the apparent answers to my prayers a mockery― the scorn of an angry God who would never be appeased?

Soon other thoughts came. The darkness, though still here, was not the same―it was not tangible―it was the darkness of the second division.

So hope came again.